Afraid I'm Thinking to Fit My Own Skill

When planing a dumili, the shape of the head matters most.

That's where a changho's refinement comes from.

It has to come out egg-shaped. But keep planing, and the head gets flattened.

It's not that I failed to make it. I did produce an egg shape. Just not that egg shape. Seen from a distance, no one would know, and it wouldn't even register as a failure.

Only the refinement sinks a little. The problem comes after that. After it gets flattened a few times, the next time I'm working it out, I start thinking from that flattened egg as my baseline.

A maker roughly needs three things: skill, an eye for it, and the ability to explain and present what's been made.

A large organization splits these three across different people, but in a small workshop, all three have to live inside one person.

I think I understand now why Jesus's occupation was carpenter. Holding all three in one person takes about that much.

I'm not trying to say all three are hard to hold at once. What I'm afraid of is the order.

The proper order puts the eye first. The eye decides what to make, and the hand follows.

That's how the hand grows. It's a story everyone already knows. I know it too. Knowing it, it still flips on me.

A shape rises in my head. And in the very next instant, another thought immediately attaches itself.

How do I even join this. Can this tool do it. How many extra steps does this add.

And I start paring it down.

It's not that the shape never rose. It rose. It just got cut down right after it rose. Which means I know exactly what I threw away. I throw it away knowing full well.

A reason attaches itself every time I throw something away. It adds a step. The cost doesn't work out. This tool can't make that shape. Every single one of them is a true statement.

Which is exactly why there's no way to stop it. And on top of that, they're small. The thickness of one slat, one corner, a few millimeters on a mili head. Sizes too small to even qualify as a real decision.

If I'd given something up in one big moment, I'd at least feel the sting of it — but this kind gets forgotten the same day.

The small things pile up. Once they've piled up, there's no going back to check. I've never once lost anything big, and yet an object stands there that's different from what I first pictured.

This is exactly where I want to blame the tool. There are shapes a plane simply can't produce, and lines a saw simply can't follow.

There's something I overheard while I was learning. Someone had brought in a drawing with a circle on it. There's only one kind of gol-mili plane.

The curve that plane produces is fixed, so a true circle won't come out of it. A carpenter has to work to fit the tool. That's what I heard, back then.

It was true. Draw the shape first without knowing the tool, and nothing gets built. I learned that lesson myself, from those very words.

The difference is when you apply it. Once what you're making is already decided, you have to fit the tool. That's how the object actually gets built.

But if you fit the tool at the point where you're deciding what to make in the first place, you're trapped from that moment on. Same words, different place to use them.

So the tool itself just sits there. A plane has never once trapped me. I was the one who did the thinking to fit the plane.

So does switching tools solve it? I use CNC, and I've been building a program where you just enter the dimensions and a drawing comes out.

Shapes my hand couldn't produce now come out. But the same trap is waiting there too. There's a minimum radius set by the end mill's diameter, and a size limit set by the fixturing method.

You can't build anything outside the rules you've programmed in. Only the tool changes; the order can stay exactly the same.

A tool is a means, not the goal. I know that story. I know it, and I still cut to fit the tool anyway.

So this isn't a story with a solution. Today, too, some egg was probably flattened a little.

I'm writing this down only so that, the next time it gets flattened, I might at least notice.